Giggling

Tracey Emin in The Independent today, reflects on her week in a health retreat, detoxing with a good friend:

“I sat down opposite my friend Amanda Love – (no really that’s her name, and it gets worse: her middle name is Gaye – she wasn’t born Love, she married into Love) – and said to her very earnestly: “I know why I have been unhappy most of my life.”

She took a deep compassionate breath, lifted her brow and said “Why?”

“Because I don’t eat enough fruit.”

She looked at me in stunned silence at the simplicity behind my reasoning, and banged her head against the desk in dismay. With that we started to laugh. I was curled up on the floor, tears running down my face, screaming: “See! See! What did we have for breakfast this morning!”

All she had to do was say the word “mango” and it all started over again, a 20-minute giggling fit – not bad for two women in their forties! It’s fantastic to let yourself go and not hold back. Laughing must be one of the best things in the whole world. And I swear to God, the tears came from somewhere else!

I love this description of ‘girlie giggling’.

Plans are afoot for a weekend break for me and some of my very favourite giggling compadres. I predict much chocolate, much shopping, much drinking and much giggling. The sort of giggling that heals the soul.

More of you boys really ought to get down with the giggling thing.

It’s cheaper than therapy.